United Airlines Card Downgrade Impact to Credit Scores

I last reported in this post that we downgraded both my wife and my United Airlines credit cards to avoid the annual fee and impact to our credit scores by closing the accounts. Well I am happy to announce it looks like it was a positive move with no impact to our credit scores.

I decided to check in this week to CreditKarma to see if there has been any fluctuation in my score. My only real concern was that by closing one type of card and getting a new card (in essence that is what happened when they switched the cards around) that there might be an impact to our scores. I last checked my score back in April, prior to switching over the cards. My score at the time via CreditKarma, which bases their score on TransUnion, was 774. My score today after the card change was…

This was excellent news, and I suspect my wife’s score would be the same too, but I have not double checked it yet.

Credit Karma is great for a quick check of your score based on the TransUnion credit bureau. One might question if I am happy with my 774 score via Credit Karma. Well surely I would always like it to be a lot higher. However, historically, my TransUnion score is always lower than those from Experian or Equifax, even though the reports all contain the same information. What matters to me most is to monitor it to make sure there are 1) no mistakes, or 2) that the score is not fluctuating or declining. Surely if it goes up I am not going to complain.

The nice thing about Credit Karma is that I can check my score all the time if I wish for free. It only comes up as a soft pull and thus has no impact on your credit score. If I were to go through annualcreditreport.com and request my TransUnion credit report, I would still need to pay to see my score. Plus I am only able to pull my report for free once per year direct from the three bureaus. Credit Karma, while not allowing you to directly view your credit report, also has some nice tools to allow you to monitor changes in your file and see where you rate nationally against other people. As long as we are both in the Excellent category, I am not going to complain.